From your post, you not looking at this with the right perspective, not asking the right questions, nor asking them to the right people. You state that you have been put in charge of "maintaining" and never once mention anything about your company's predicted growth, development plans, future computation needs, near and long term service offerings, uptime requirements, security requirements or so forth. You have to do a requirements analysis that extends to between five and ten years and design a system that can grow seamlessly with your employer, meeting their current and expected needs in all pertinent areas.
If you can develop a system that does what is required on paper, the next step is to implement it in parallel with the existing system, and transition services and users over in phases. After all services have been transitioned, you can decommission the old infrastructure piece by piece.
I had to sit down and install a bunch of the shared decoding libraries for mpegs among other things, she couldn't play mp3s with the out of the box install. Seriously? 3 different apps complained about the lack of suitable decoders, but only one was smart enough to pull up a package management dialogue and give the option to actually do something about it. This is something pretty much everyone uses, why set it up so backasswardly? Every app installed by default that plays mp3s should work. You shouldn't have to guess correctly which app you need to use to play your music.
The network manager used in Ubuntu 9.10 has problems with reinitializing network interfaces that go dead for some period of time. When she boots windows the network interface gets automatically re-initialized after connectivity failure, however the Gnome network manager does not seem to get this right very often - I've instructed her to wait until other people come back online then unplug and re-plug her ethernet cable, which fixes the problem. I am on the same network and I have no problems with KDE's built in network manager.
Honestly, I like a lot of the stuff they're doing in Ubuntu, however having JUST set up a complete novice Linux user with Koala and watched the things they had an issue with:
1. The SMB mounting tool is nice, except it doesn't show shares in Gnome file dialogs! The connection it makes is not persistent. Nor is SMBFS installed by default. I had to install smbfs then go in and set up everything manually in fstab, which is ridiculous for a distro not to have covered in a cleaner way. That's not hard for me but come on!
2. Mime types are not properly set up in firefox. With a totally fresh install, a.doc downloaded from the web cannot be opened directly, even though it's listed as the type handler... She ended up going to the containing folder and opening it through the file browser, again this is pretty bad not to have working.
3. Sound settings are not properly saved by the mixer on reboot. In addition though pulse is installed by default it doesn't work nearly as well the way it is configured by default as in some other distributions I've used. I've had to sit down and fix various sound issues several times.
There are probably more things I'm forgetting as well, or that she has not seen fit to bother me with...
On the plus side, the regressions in 9.04 with full screen flash and some types of webcams seem to have been fixed (no more LD_PRELOAD shortcuts). That's positive.
Ultimately, the only thing at this point that is really keeping me considering Ubuntu/Kubuntu over SuSE is apt. YaST is pretty good, but apt is better and the package coverage is also better. I really dislike Canonical's insistence on making you jump through hoops to use "non free" software. I am very pro-free-software, however if anyone involved with high level decisions at Canonical is reading this right now, give me a freaking button I can click during the installation that says "I am a big kid, I can make my own choices regarding free/non free software, I'm not interested in making a big philosophical statement with this computer, please include non-free software in my basic installation".
I'm sorry, but Plone kills drupal when it comes to design expandability and security. I like Drupal a lot but unless you have a huge in house PHP team already or you're not interested in ever utilizing any enterprise level features on your CMS, it is a mistake to use Drupal over Plone or an enterprise level CMS. It's all about the right tool for the right job...
1. Executives should ALWAYS be last in line for any forced migration like that... The right way to do it is: A - deploy in test environment B - staged rollout, starting with bottom teir employees in batches, gradually progressing up the organizational chart. C - ??? D - Profit!!!
So obviously the accounting department would be transitioned first and that scenario would never occur if you have a halfway competent IT team. I feel sorry for your company you have any position of responsibility in the IT department.
2. Passing around excel spreadsheets is amateur hour... I grimace when I see companies with more than 20 employees do this sort of thing. There are plenty of nice financial projection suites that do out of the box stuff, if you want to do any sort of sophisticated prediction and modelling, use something like R which has robust mathematical and statistical capabilities and tons of finance modules available. If you have money and want to be professional, your financial department should be integrated into an ERP platform.
Microsoft office stopped being relevant after 2003. The whole reason office was such an immovable behemoth was backwards compatibility and the retraining curve for other office suites. As it stands now, openoffice is easier to migrate users to than office 2007/2010 and the whole docx/xlsx fiasco has caused a lot of headaches. Few people care about the added functionality in newer versions.
The accounting department should be switched first (execs should always be last in line for any sort of forced migration like that). In addition, if your accounting department is sending around a bunch of excel spreadsheets your shop is amateur hour anyhow... *cough* L2ERP n00b *cough*
As a mathematician/statistician, I try to encourage people to approach the subject from a wholistic and philosophical standpoint. I prefer applied maths, and for most people I think that is the direction which tends to be most rewarding. The way that I make these interests dovetail is by trying to understand the foundations of various branches of applied mathematics and how they relate to each other. For instance, there is a great deal of overlap between statistical physics, machine learning, bioinformatics and mathematical finance. A rigorous understanding of probability theory, information theory and real analysis will take you a LONG way in any branch of applied maths. Stochastic modeling is at the core of everything applied, and being able to decompose a system into components (be they wavelets, sinusoids, eigenvectors, polynomials or what have you) is incredibly important as well.
Ultimately, if you are going to spend the next 4-7 years in a PhD program you should be really passionate about what you are doing. Several other people have mentioned this as well but it's important enough that I think it bears repeating.
These sorts of problems are solved by a little bit of advanced engineering. You just have to be smart about it. The biggest issue is actually server load, not bandwidth or memory - Of course, by using your clients as a platform for distributed computing (with suitable censoring, randomization and possibly multi-client verification) this could be ameliorated to some degree. It would probably make economic sense just to bite the bullet and outlay some extra cash for servers in order to make cool stuff like this happen - not like Blizzard isn't making cash hand over fist.
If I were to tackle this issue I would probably implement an adaptive density partitioning algorithm based on predicted resource availability. Things which have unpredictable behavior, things you are interacting with or which you have a high probability of interacting with in the very near future get love and things which for all intents and purposes are scenery or are very predictable can be simulated on the client side with very infrequent updates from the server. Smart lag:D
I got a 2nd gen Nano, it does exactly what I want. To be honest, I considered getting something besides the ipod strongly. When I sat down and did a cost/benefit analysis on the various players on the market at the time, the nano still came out on top (with the only competition being the iRiver).
Well, as a blanket statement I was incorrect. The vast majority of the references I pulled up in the literature are in reference to Rydberg atoms however, and I don't really think that applies in this case. In general it is correct that microwaves have insufficient energy to cause bond dissociation.
I'm not a physical chemist, nor am I interested enough in this topic to go digging through the literature to be able to cover all possible circumstances. I stand by my original statement that you're going to have an extremely hard time getting a fluorine to dissociate from your typical carbon by trying to ionize it off in a microwave, if you can do it at all. If you can figure out an energy efficient way of doing it I'm sure you'll become an incredibly, incredibly wealthy man:)
Unfortunately, microwaves are unable to cause ionization. A gamma ray oven OTOH... Though even in that case, you'd end up with a chamber full of carbon and hydrogen radicals long before you managed to get all the fluorines off, and the amount of energy that would take is ridiculous.
Chlorinated polycarbons can be recovered through chemical processes, though I doubt it's efficient to do so. Fluorinated carbons are incredibly stable, and thus are Fluorinated for eternity basically, short of bombarding the molecules with high energy ions much like you would in a mass spec...
There are a decent number of genes which encode RNA products (transfer RNAs, the RNA component of snRNPs, the Ribosome, etc, etc). In fact the majority of pol I and pol III transcripts in the case of E. coli...
I think this is all part of google's plans to get into the video on demand market. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they are in talks with set top box makers to include a google video on demand function as part of the hardware, it would be really easy to implement. They have already been in talks with content providers for a long time and I wouldn't be surprised if they roll out "google tv" in the next year. This would allow studios to make available their entire back catalog of television shows and movies, with searching so you can find that exact episode you want to see. They already do extensive data mining via your google account, which is tied into google mail, google desktop and google searches, add in your television and movie viewing (with google TV) and product purchasing (with google wallet or whatever they just rolled out) info, and I can see them deliver ultra-targeted high premium advertising with built in one click purchasing option through your remote. That would make a KILLING.
Woop. We're going to start seeing a lot of picture in picture and "in context" (think truman show) ads now... I can hardly wait. Good thing I don't really watch much tv.
The point is that the paradigm of music distribution has shifted with the advent of the internet and efficient encoding algorithms. This isn't an evolutionary change in the current system, this is a revolution. Just because the majority of the people don't understand the politics behind it, doesn't mean they aren't part of it. The peasants in the french revolution didn't think about the rational failings of the current political system, they were merely hungry and poor. The peasants revolted illegaly, and were "terrorists" to the monarch and the aristocracy, however today the French revolution is celebrated (bastille day).
I agree with you that according to the laws and traditional ethos, the copyright infringement is "immature." However, the Internet has radically shifted the ethos of those who have been thoroughly immersed in it, at least in regards to the dissemination of information. It's easily the most radical element in society since the motor vehicle, and promises to massively change the way we live our lives. You can't stop a social movement with laws. This is like Hegel's antithesis, which the thesis will combine with to form a synthesis.
I would suggest that you read Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. Specifically the section on the concept of panopticism. It takes the concept of irrational power structures a step beyond Nietzsche. The concepts of surveillance, self-moderation, censure and how they relate together in a power system to make it self perpetuating are quite clearly laid out there. It's a fairly dense work but very worthwhile if you havn't read it yet.
When will companies learn that in order to compete with compressed and "pirated" music, they either need to add compelling value to the retail product, or bring the product in at a price point which is much more attractive. 99 cents a song is about the same price as it would cost you to purchase the physical disk in most cases, and if the artist is someone I enjoy enough to actually give money to, I want the work in unadulterated form.
Usually with me, the way it works is thus:
If I enjoy the music somewhat but it's not something I can see myself listening to a lot/for a long time, I just download the mp3s. Linkin Park, VNV Nation, and Wumpscut are good examples here.
If I enjoy a music a lot, and can see myself going back to it over time/listening to it all the time, I'll try to rip it from the local college radio station archives, or buy it if I can find a copy for around 10 dollars. Tool's Aenima or anything by Amon Tobin would be perfect examples of this category.
If I listen to the music compulsively AND appreciate it on an intelligent artistic level, and that is still with me after listening to it for a couple weeks, I usually buy the cd for my collection. Examples of this category include Underworld's dubnobasswithmyheadman, Orbital's In Sides, Morcheeba's Big Calm
Honestly, in most cases even used CDs are over priced. With the exception of a very few really good CDs the most I'd pay for a disk is about 4.99. I might go for a system where you could "check out" tracks... Perhaps 100 tracks a month for 10 bucks, with the option of previewing a track a couple of times before being forced to add it to the 100 track list or discontinue listening to it for that month. Of course, something like that would provide too much consumer benefit, so don't expect to see anything like that, ever.
Slashdot Mirror
From your post, you not looking at this with the right perspective, not asking the right questions, nor asking them to the right people. You state that you have been put in charge of "maintaining" and never once mention anything about your company's predicted growth, development plans, future computation needs, near and long term service offerings, uptime requirements, security requirements or so forth. You have to do a requirements analysis that extends to between five and ten years and design a system that can grow seamlessly with your employer, meeting their current and expected needs in all pertinent areas.
If you can develop a system that does what is required on paper, the next step is to implement it in parallel with the existing system, and transition services and users over in phases. After all services have been transitioned, you can decommission the old infrastructure piece by piece.
Haha, to edit my posts...
I had to sit down and install a bunch of the shared decoding libraries for mpegs among other things, she couldn't play mp3s with the out of the box install. Seriously? 3 different apps complained about the lack of suitable decoders, but only one was smart enough to pull up a package management dialogue and give the option to actually do something about it. This is something pretty much everyone uses, why set it up so backasswardly? Every app installed by default that plays mp3s should work. You shouldn't have to guess correctly which app you need to use to play your music.
Oh, of note:
The network manager used in Ubuntu 9.10 has problems with reinitializing network interfaces that go dead for some period of time. When she boots windows the network interface gets automatically re-initialized after connectivity failure, however the Gnome network manager does not seem to get this right very often - I've instructed her to wait until other people come back online then unplug and re-plug her ethernet cable, which fixes the problem. I am on the same network and I have no problems with KDE's built in network manager.
Honestly, I like a lot of the stuff they're doing in Ubuntu, however having JUST set up a complete novice Linux user with Koala and watched the things they had an issue with:
1. The SMB mounting tool is nice, except it doesn't show shares in Gnome file dialogs! The connection it makes is not persistent. Nor is SMBFS installed by default. I had to install smbfs then go in and set up everything manually in fstab, which is ridiculous for a distro not to have covered in a cleaner way. That's not hard for me but come on!
2. Mime types are not properly set up in firefox. With a totally fresh install, a .doc downloaded from the web cannot be opened directly, even though it's listed as the type handler... She ended up going to the containing folder and opening it through the file browser, again this is pretty bad not to have working.
3. Sound settings are not properly saved by the mixer on reboot. In addition though pulse is installed by default it doesn't work nearly as well the way it is configured by default as in some other distributions I've used. I've had to sit down and fix various sound issues several times.
There are probably more things I'm forgetting as well, or that she has not seen fit to bother me with...
On the plus side, the regressions in 9.04 with full screen flash and some types of webcams seem to have been fixed (no more LD_PRELOAD shortcuts). That's positive.
Ultimately, the only thing at this point that is really keeping me considering Ubuntu/Kubuntu over SuSE is apt. YaST is pretty good, but apt is better and the package coverage is also better. I really dislike Canonical's insistence on making you jump through hoops to use "non free" software. I am very pro-free-software, however if anyone involved with high level decisions at Canonical is reading this right now, give me a freaking button I can click during the installation that says "I am a big kid, I can make my own choices regarding free/non free software, I'm not interested in making a big philosophical statement with this computer, please include non-free software in my basic installation".
I'm sorry, but Plone kills drupal when it comes to design expandability and security. I like Drupal a lot but unless you have a huge in house PHP team already or you're not interested in ever utilizing any enterprise level features on your CMS, it is a mistake to use Drupal over Plone or an enterprise level CMS. It's all about the right tool for the right job...
That's completely backwards on several levels...
1. Executives should ALWAYS be last in line for any forced migration like that... The right way to do it is:
A - deploy in test environment
B - staged rollout, starting with bottom teir employees in batches, gradually progressing up the organizational chart.
C - ???
D - Profit!!!
So obviously the accounting department would be transitioned first and that scenario would never occur if you have a halfway competent IT team. I feel sorry for your company you have any position of responsibility in the IT department.
2. Passing around excel spreadsheets is amateur hour... I grimace when I see companies with more than 20 employees do this sort of thing. There are plenty of nice financial projection suites that do out of the box stuff, if you want to do any sort of sophisticated prediction and modelling, use something like R which has robust mathematical and statistical capabilities and tons of finance modules available. If you have money and want to be professional, your financial department should be integrated into an ERP platform.
Microsoft office stopped being relevant after 2003. The whole reason office was such an immovable behemoth was backwards compatibility and the retraining curve for other office suites. As it stands now, openoffice is easier to migrate users to than office 2007/2010 and the whole docx/xlsx fiasco has caused a lot of headaches. Few people care about the added functionality in newer versions.
That's all wrong.
The accounting department should be switched first (execs should always be last in line for any sort of forced migration like that). In addition, if your accounting department is sending around a bunch of excel spreadsheets your shop is amateur hour anyhow... *cough* L2ERP n00b *cough*
It was a typo... what they meant to say was "geographies with a lower average (w)age"...
As a mathematician/statistician, I try to encourage people to approach the subject from a wholistic and philosophical standpoint. I prefer applied maths, and for most people I think that is the direction which tends to be most rewarding. The way that I make these interests dovetail is by trying to understand the foundations of various branches of applied mathematics and how they relate to each other. For instance, there is a great deal of overlap between statistical physics, machine learning, bioinformatics and mathematical finance. A rigorous understanding of probability theory, information theory and real analysis will take you a LONG way in any branch of applied maths. Stochastic modeling is at the core of everything applied, and being able to decompose a system into components (be they wavelets, sinusoids, eigenvectors, polynomials or what have you) is incredibly important as well.
Ultimately, if you are going to spend the next 4-7 years in a PhD program you should be really passionate about what you are doing. Several other people have mentioned this as well but it's important enough that I think it bears repeating.
... Best moderation EVER.
These sorts of problems are solved by a little bit of advanced engineering. You just have to be smart about it. The biggest issue is actually server load, not bandwidth or memory - Of course, by using your clients as a platform for distributed computing (with suitable censoring, randomization and possibly multi-client verification) this could be ameliorated to some degree. It would probably make economic sense just to bite the bullet and outlay some extra cash for servers in order to make cool stuff like this happen - not like Blizzard isn't making cash hand over fist.
:D
If I were to tackle this issue I would probably implement an adaptive density partitioning algorithm based on predicted resource availability. Things which have unpredictable behavior, things you are interacting with or which you have a high probability of interacting with in the very near future get love and things which for all intents and purposes are scenery or are very predictable can be simulated on the client side with very infrequent updates from the server. Smart lag
I got a 2nd gen Nano, it does exactly what I want. To be honest, I considered getting something besides the ipod strongly. When I sat down and did a cost/benefit analysis on the various players on the market at the time, the nano still came out on top (with the only competition being the iRiver).
Well, as a blanket statement I was incorrect. The vast majority of the references I pulled up in the literature are in reference to Rydberg atoms however, and I don't really think that applies in this case. In general it is correct that microwaves have insufficient energy to cause bond dissociation.
:)
I'm not a physical chemist, nor am I interested enough in this topic to go digging through the literature to be able to cover all possible circumstances. I stand by my original statement that you're going to have an extremely hard time getting a fluorine to dissociate from your typical carbon by trying to ionize it off in a microwave, if you can do it at all. If you can figure out an energy efficient way of doing it I'm sure you'll become an incredibly, incredibly wealthy man
Unfortunately, microwaves are unable to cause ionization. A gamma ray oven OTOH... Though even in that case, you'd end up with a chamber full of carbon and hydrogen radicals long before you managed to get all the fluorines off, and the amount of energy that would take is ridiculous.
:)
Nice try though
Chlorinated polycarbons can be recovered through chemical processes, though I doubt it's efficient to do so. Fluorinated carbons are incredibly stable, and thus are Fluorinated for eternity basically, short of bombarding the molecules with high energy ions much like you would in a mass spec...
There are a decent number of genes which encode RNA products (transfer RNAs, the RNA component of snRNPs, the Ribosome, etc, etc). In fact the majority of pol I and pol III transcripts in the case of E. coli...
Uhhh, sounds kind of like Resistance: Fall of Man *cough*
Republicans don't have to worry about the black vote...
I think this is all part of google's plans to get into the video on demand market. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they are in talks with set top box makers to include a google video on demand function as part of the hardware, it would be really easy to implement. They have already been in talks with content providers for a long time and I wouldn't be surprised if they roll out "google tv" in the next year. This would allow studios to make available their entire back catalog of television shows and movies, with searching so you can find that exact episode you want to see. They already do extensive data mining via your google account, which is tied into google mail, google desktop and google searches, add in your television and movie viewing (with google TV) and product purchasing (with google wallet or whatever they just rolled out) info, and I can see them deliver ultra-targeted high premium advertising with built in one click purchasing option through your remote. That would make a KILLING.
Woop. We're going to start seeing a lot of picture in picture and "in context" (think truman show) ads now... I can hardly wait. Good thing I don't really watch much tv.
The point is that the paradigm of music distribution has shifted with the advent of the internet and efficient encoding algorithms. This isn't an evolutionary change in the current system, this is a revolution. Just because the majority of the people don't understand the politics behind it, doesn't mean they aren't part of it. The peasants in the french revolution didn't think about the rational failings of the current political system, they were merely hungry and poor. The peasants revolted illegaly, and were "terrorists" to the monarch and the aristocracy, however today the French revolution is celebrated (bastille day).
I agree with you that according to the laws and traditional ethos, the copyright infringement is "immature." However, the Internet has radically shifted the ethos of those who have been thoroughly immersed in it, at least in regards to the dissemination of information. It's easily the most radical element in society since the motor vehicle, and promises to massively change the way we live our lives. You can't stop a social movement with laws. This is like Hegel's antithesis, which the thesis will combine with to form a synthesis.
Machine Gestalt
I would suggest that you read Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. Specifically the section on the concept of panopticism. It takes the concept of irrational power structures a step beyond Nietzsche. The concepts of surveillance, self-moderation, censure and how they relate together in a power system to make it self perpetuating are quite clearly laid out there. It's a fairly dense work but very worthwhile if you havn't read it yet.
Machinegestalt
When will companies learn that in order to compete with compressed and "pirated" music, they either need to add compelling value to the retail product, or bring the product in at a price point which is much more attractive. 99 cents a song is about the same price as it would cost you to purchase the physical disk in most cases, and if the artist is someone I enjoy enough to actually give money to, I want the work in unadulterated form.
Usually with me, the way it works is thus:
If I enjoy the music somewhat but it's not something I can see myself listening to a lot/for a long time, I just download the mp3s. Linkin Park, VNV Nation, and Wumpscut are good examples here.
If I enjoy a music a lot, and can see myself going back to it over time/listening to it all the time, I'll try to rip it from the local college radio station archives, or buy it if I can find a copy for around 10 dollars. Tool's Aenima or anything by Amon Tobin would be perfect examples of this category.
If I listen to the music compulsively AND appreciate it on an intelligent artistic level, and that is still with me after listening to it for a couple weeks, I usually buy the cd for my collection. Examples of this category include Underworld's dubnobasswithmyheadman, Orbital's In Sides, Morcheeba's Big Calm
Honestly, in most cases even used CDs are over priced. With the exception of a very few really good CDs the most I'd pay for a disk is about 4.99. I might go for a system where you could "check out" tracks... Perhaps 100 tracks a month for 10 bucks, with the option of previewing a track a couple of times before being forced to add it to the 100 track list or discontinue listening to it for that month. Of course, something like that would provide too much consumer benefit, so don't expect to see anything like that, ever.
"It seems stupid to me for them to make such a proclamation which will only serve to inflame loyal Mac based customers of many years."
And Photoshop users are going to switch to what exactly? Nothing else even comes close, and Adobe is quite aware of this.
Ad hominem! bad! :D